[…] “What’s missing is the truth,” wrote Brady in a Spring 2001 newsletter article for the Women’s Cancer Resource Center, a support services center located in Berkeley, Calif. “There’s no talk about prevention, except, in terms of lifestyle, your diet for instance. No talk about ways to grow food more safely. No talk about how to curb industrial carcinogens. No talk about contaminated water or global warming.”

[…]

So most people would be shocked to find that the Komen Foundation helped block a meaningful Patients Bill of Rights for the women it has purported to serve since the group began in 1982.

Despite proclaiming herself before a 2001 Congressional panel as a “patient advocate for the past 20 years,” demanding access to the best possible medical care for all breast cancer patients, Federal Election Commission records show the Komen Foundation and its allies lobbied against the consumer-friendly version of the Patients Bill of Rights in 1999, 2000 and 2001. Brinker then trumpeted old friend George W. Bush in August 2001 for backing a “strong” Patients’ Bill of Rights, while most patient advocates felt betrayed.

Brinker’s support of Bush should come as no surprise, since Bush nominated Nancy Brinker for a U.S. Ambassador post just less than one business quarter earlier, at the end of May 2001. The President also no doubt helped toast Brinker’s Congressional approval for the Hungary position on Aug. 3, 2001, less than 24 hours after the House version of the Patients’ Bill of Rights, dubbed “the HMO bill of rights” by critics, passed on Aug. 2, 2001. […]

[…] Consider the following simple question: How much does it cost to stay in the hospital when someone is sick? Until 1983, the answer was simple: You, your insurer, or Medicare paid the hospital on a “per diem” basis, meaning that the hospital charged roughly the expense they incurred, plus a small administrative fee. You paid for what you got. In 1983, however, Medicare suddenly changed everything. The agency adopted the “prospective payment system,” which decoupled payments from the actual cost of care in the hospital. In other words, they suddenly paid a fixed price that had nothing to do with what happened in the hospital. In the beginning, administrators loved this since the fixed prices were so high that hospitals had an average 13-percent margin on Medicare patients. Soon enough, however, the payments had fallen behind inflation, and by 1991, hospitals faced an average margin of minus 2.4 percent. They responded rationally to this crisis by jacking up list prices for private insurers like Blue Cross or Aetna in a redistributive practice known as “cost shifting.” In 1997, the Balanced Budget Act further lowered Medicare payments, and soon private insurers were paying 20 to 30 percent higher rates than Medicare.* In effect, this practice amounts to an annual tax of about $922 per privately insured family, which defrays the cost of those on public insurance. (A strange corollary: Uninsured or “self-pay” patients get charged two- to threefold higher sticker prices than insurers pay, because no one’s negotiated lower rates for them.) […]

In Michele Bachmann’s home district, evangelicals have created an extreme anti-gay climate. After a rash of suicides, the kids are fighting back.

By Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone

Every morning, Brittany Geldert stepped off the bus and bolted through the double doors of Fred Moore Middle School, her nerves already on high alert, bracing for the inevitable.

“Dyke.”

Pretending not to hear, Brittany would walk briskly to her locker, past the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders who loitered in menacing packs.

“Whore.”

Like many 13-year-olds, Brittany knew seventh grade was a living hell. But what she didn’t know was that she was caught in the crossfire of a culture war being waged by local evangelicals inspired by their high-profile congressional representative Michele Bachmann, who graduated from Anoka High School and, until recently, was a member of one of the most conservative churches in the area. When Christian activists who considered gays an abomination forced a measure through the school board forbidding the discussion of homosexuality in the district’s public schools, kids like Brittany were unknowingly thrust into the heart of a clash that was about to become intertwined with tragedy. […]